On December 23, 1864, Malinda Taylor penned a letter to her husband, Pvt. Grant Taylor, who was serving in the Confederate Army in southern Alabama. “[A]nother Cristmas [sic] is nearly here and you are still absent,” wrote Malinda. “I was so in hopes you would spende [sic] this Cristmas [sic] at home but it seemes [sic] that I will have to spend it again without you. I pray before another Cristmas [sic] shall role around that you may bee [sic] permitted to get home safe and sound.” As Grant and Malinda Taylor longed to be reunited, conditions continued to deteriorate throughout the Confederacy and in Alabama. Sherman’s March to the Sea was successful, and in the early months of 1865, he moved his army northward to meet Grant’s Army of the Potomac in Virginia. Meanwhile, Grant decided to send a final raid through the Deep South in order to destroy the arsenal in Selma, Alabama. By the end of March 1865, Union cavalrymen under the leadership of Gen. James H. Wilson had crossed the Tennessee River and were heading south through Alabama.

Becoming Alabama:Civil War Era

Author

Megan L. Bever is currently a doctoral student in the Department of History at the University of Alabama. Her research interests include the nineteenth-century South and the Civil War in American culture.